Fourth Plinth Trafalgar Square: Cock, review

The latest sculpture to sit on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth is called
Cock. Serena Davies went along to see Boris Johnson unveil it.

3

Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth is currently occupied by a giant blue cockerel, designed by German scuptor Katharina Fritsch.Photo: EPA/ANDY RAIN

By Serena Davies

1:27PM BST 25 Jul 2013

At the Royal Court Theatre four years ago there was a play called Cock. Various literati who fancied themselves humorists did some public sniggering about this title. If only a wordsmith of the stature of Boris Johnson had been among them.

Today the Mayor of London unveiled another cultural Cock: the latest statue to sit on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. It is a bright blue cockerel, but its name is most definitely Cock, and the German artist who created it, Katharina Fritsch, has made it clear that she fully intends the double entendre. How would the Mayor, king of the gaffe, dodge the pitfalls this beast presented in his speech in its honour?

Brilliantly, by never once mentioning the word, but with every sentence apparently teetering on the brink of doing so. None more so than in his final introduction: “Feast your eyes on this beautiful new Fourth Plinth sculpture. Ladies and gentlemen, here is the big blue… BIRD.”

The speech was hilarious, playing on our yearning for an almighty embarrassment that never came. He did in passing call it “hideous”, but I’m not sure anyone noticed. Most will remember his joke at the expense of David Cameron: that should people google the sculpture in a few years’ time, they would not be able to find it – “at the behest of the Prime Minister”.

The bird itself, in a gorgeous powder blue that’s just a little bit paler than Yves Klein’s famous indigo hue, is one of the jolliest things to have sat upon the square’s spare plinth since the public art commissions for it began in 2005.

There have been only two really good pieces of art on it before now: Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo (a Christ-like figure) and Rachel Whiteread’s Monument (a transparent cast of the plinth itself). Fritsch, who specialises in colourful sculptures and has a record of interesting public art commissions that come with a frisson of shock, hasn’t done something as impressive as those.

The predominant impression this giant bird gives, despite its pretty feathers, is that it looks pretty silly. But then Fritsch is a feminist whose intention with this sculpture, which stands 50ft away from Nelson atop his phallic column, is to mock male posturing – “She said it’s all to do with a woman’s rendition of a man, or something like that,” reported Boris. So she probably wants us to find it daft.